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THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2013
McConaughey has recently become one of the most inventive actors in movies.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
GETTING SERIOUS
Matthew McConaughey in "Dallas Buyers Club."
BY DAVID DENBY
Some of the famous male movie actors
of the past, like James Stewart and
John Wayne, aged slowly and naturally,
achieving greater depth in their roles as a
privilege of years. Robert Redford's super-
lative performance in "All Is Lost" is the
major case, at the moment, for the power
of ripeness. What has happened with
Matthew McConaughey, now turning
forty-four, is more abrupt and startling.
The gleaming young man of a few years
ago, with the brilliant smile and the golden
torso---an easygoing sport who, tempera-
mentally, never seemed more than fifty
yards from the beach---has become one of
the most inventive actors in movies. Just
recently, McConaughey has given explor-
atory, strikingly intelligent performances
in a wide variety of roles: the reticent
Texas lawyer in "Bernie"; the happy-in-
sleaze, male-strip-club owner in "Magic
Mike''; and the fantasizing runaway out-
law, in love with a faithless woman, in
"Mud." And now, in "Dallas Buyers
Club," as the real-life Ronald Woodroof,
he does work that is pretty much astound-
ing. Woodroof was an electrician, rodeo
hot shot, and hetero fornicator who, in
1985, tested positive for H.I.V. I'm think-
ing not simply of McConaughey's physi-
cal transformation---the nearly fifty pounds
lost, the change from an Adonis to a dark,
spidery skeleton. His body now appears
shaped by overuse and neglect, like the
off-kilter frames of oil workers and coal
miners in Richard Avedon's magnificent
collection "Into the West"---men whose
character is seemingly pulled by taut neck
muscles right into their burning eyes. But
it's McConaughey's spiritual transforma-
tion that is most remarkable. His gaze is at
once desperate and challenging.
When we first see Woodroof, he's al-
ready ill, but he doesn't know it. A rough-
and-ready guy with indifferent compan-
ions (he doesn't seem to much care for any
of his friends), he works, drinks, smokes,
gambles, rides bulls, and has sex with
groupies in the rodeo pens. Like a Las
Vegas m.c., he swivels back from the waist
as he welcomes his unappetizing chums
to his plywood-lined pleasure palace in a
trailer park. His style is cheap and show-
offy, but who can tell him that? In his
world, he's king, an ignorant but fast-talk-
ing swashbuckler, whose speech is gar-
nished by belittling profanities tucked
into the corners of sentences---you have
to listen hard to hear them. After an acci-
dent at work, Ron is taken to the hospital,
and when he wakes up he's confronted by
two doctors (Dennis O'Hare and Jennifer
Garner), who tell him that his T-cell
count is down to nine. They give him
thirty days to live. He snarls that he's not
"a faggot," and storms out.
The French-Canadian director Jean-
Marc Vallée shot the bulk of the film in
trailer parks, scrappy construction sites,
and seamy rodeo pens. He doesn't clean
up anything, and he doesn't avoid scenes
of suffering. But Vallée has given "Dallas
Buyers Club" the pace and the verve of a
classic commercial movie. The script, by
Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, is raw
and urgent, and McConaughey's perfor-
mance drives the movie forward the way
Julia Roberts propelled "Erin Brocko-
vich." Both movies are about cocky, self-
taught outsiders who take on the estab-
lishment---obnoxious egotists who create
new realities around them.
"Dallas" plunges us back into that pe-
riod of mid-nineteen-eighties anguish
when people with AIDS seemed to be liv-
ing in a war zone, and help was, at best, a
long way off. AZT is being given a dou-
ble-blind trial in a Dallas hospital, under
F.D.A. auspices, and Ron, unable to get
into the trial, buys the drug from a larce-
nous orderly. When he can't get any
more, he goes to Mexico, where a rene-
gade American doctor (Griffin Dunne)
tells him that large doses of AZT are
toxic, and gives him a mixture of zinc,
aloe, vitamins, fatty acids, the protein
Peptide T, and the less potent drug
DDC. Woodroof survives and, studying
everything he can get his hands on, be-
gins importing drugs approved in other
countries (but not by the F.D.A.), which
he blends into a primitive cocktail. He
sets up a buyers club in a Dallas motel,
and sells memberships for four hundred
dollars a month; after paying the dues,
the client gets the drugs "for free." It's a
dicey business, dependent on smuggling,
ILLUSTRATION BY STAMATIS LASKOS